What do you dislike about DNN platform?
In the free version of DNN, there's no real content authoring experience. If you want to create structured, reusable content, you have to upgrade to the paid platform or use one of the 3rd party options.
We tried going with 3rd party options, but none of them even worked. Unfortunately, the few modules that do exist in DNN's ecosystem often don't work and don't count on getting a response within months or ever.
The same goes for the community. Don't expect a response on forums or StackOverflow. The only active community seems to be on a small Facebook group.
Sometimes DNN Platform contains features that just don't work even though they are visually present. Are they bugs or is it because it only works in the paid product? Not sure.
Coming back to the lack of content editing. Since there's no real content management, you have to put your content directly into HTML modules or develop your own custom modules with your own CRUD applications.
You may as well create a static HTML website in which case the HTML output will at least be cleaner. The CMS outputs a bunch of bloat HTML, CSS, and JavaScript even when you don't need their HTML, CSS, or JS.
The only way to reduce the amount of bloat is through ugly hacks stripping out unwanted HTML.
The CMS is also fundamentally flawed to build SEO-optimized websites. Unfortunately, when a user navigates to a path that doesn't exist, which should return a 404 HTTP status, an HTTP 200 status is returned, and instead of rendering the 404 page, the parent page is returned. There's actually a valid reason for this. The reason for this behavior is that modules on the parent page could render differently depending on the path. For example, put a blog module on the parent page, and for non-existent child pages, the parent page will be returned, but instead of rendering the blog module as an overview page, it will render as an individual blog post.
This is a clever way to handle this specific scenario, but overall a huge design flaw of the CMS.
Unfortunately, this isn't the only time the wrong HTTP status code is returned. In case of an error which should result in an HTTP status code 500, a redirect is returned pointing towards an error page that returns HTTP status 200.
These behaviors are just not how websites are supposed to work and it will hurt your business as a result because search engines will struggle with indexing your websites.
There are options to damage control these issues, but not to fix the core issues in the CMS.
This is just a small subset of issues we experienced trying to build websites with DNN, but I don't want to write an essay.
In addition to the issues with the CMS itself, there's a lack of documentation, tooling, and an unresponsive community.
DNN is not helping you build websites, it's making it harder for you.
Unfortunately, we didn't have a say in what CMS to use, so we had to put an immense amount of work in, just to end up with a CMS website that content editors don't use because it's too unintuitive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
